Pfalzen (IT), Bonn (DE), Carlsbad (US), November 14, 2024

GKN Hydrogen, and Southern California Gas Co. (SoCalGas) today announced the commissioning of a research demonstration project with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on an innovative clean renewable hydrogen storage solution. The project, which will be located at NREL’s Flatirons Campus in Arvada, Colorado, uses GKN Hydrogen’s storage technology to store hydrogen in a solid state (metal hydrides) compared to traditional gaseous storage tanks. The demonstration aims to evaluate the technology’s performance and integration with clean energy systems, such as microgrids or fuel cells. The project also aims to identify the most beneficial uses of solid-state storage of clean renewable hydrogen. At scale, this technology could help accelerate the transition to a net-zero emissions economy by increasing the availability of resilient, on-site renewable power generation and storage.

“This demonstration project highlights how surplus renewable energy can be used to create and store clean renewable hydrogen to help sustainably meet our country’s growing energy demands,” said Jawaad Malik, chief strategy and sustainability officer at SoCalGas. “Continued advances in long duration storage technologies could play a crucial role in supporting on-site clean energy systems and offer an additional path to help accelerate the decarbonization of hard to electrify industries.” 

The demonstration project will use renewable energy sources like solar and wind to convert water into clean renewable hydrogen through an electrolyzer. Up to 500 kilograms of hydrogen can be stored in GKN Hydrogen’s storage system in a solid state by binding the molecules in a metal hydride at low pressure without the need for compression. The hydrogen can then be used in an on-site fuel cell to create zero-emissions electricity. 

“We believe that hydrogen has the potential to revolutionize the energy sector, and our solutions are designed to make this transition as seamless as possible,” said Jim Petrecky, chief operating officer at GKN Hydrogen. “Our storage systems promise significant potential benefits in the areas of safety, footprint, and operational and maintenance costs. Evaluating commercial use cases will be key to identifying deployment strategies as the hydrogen economy continues to scale up and production costs continue to fall.”

Utilizing NREL’s Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform, researchers aim to validate a variety of commercial and industrial decarbonization applications. The exact use case depends on the system’s integration, which could include solar, electrolyzers, battery storage and fuel cells with distribution equipment.

“The ARIES platform and infrastructure in Colorado aims to help accelerate the deployment of innovative energy technologies related to renewable energy, storage solutions and interactive loads. By integrating GKN Hydrogen’s storage solution and collaborating with major utilities like SoCalGas, we are developing solutions to tackle the complexities of modern energy systems,” said Katherine Hurst, NREL’s principal investigator for the project. “This project will be the world’s largest hydrogen storage system connected to renewable energy, and the findings could be integral to advancing the interoperability of hydrogen technologies and renewable energies at scale.”

The project is scheduled to run until December 2026.

Pfalzen (IT), Bonn (DE), Carlsbad (US), August 22nd 2024

·       First CO2-free operated communication tower installed in South Tyrol
·       Sustainable assurance of critical communication infrastructure
·       Reliable emergency power solution for 96 hours through hydrogen storage

GKN Hydrogen, global technology leader in metal hydride hydrogen storage, has successfully commissioned an innovative energy storage solution to provide emergency power for the communication facility on Ratsberg in the municipality of Toblach (South Tyrol, Italy). At the beginning of August 2023, the Provincial Office for Civil Protection within the Civil Protection Agency placed the order, as the communication facility from the 1980s was too small and previously had no emergency power.

The innovative and decentralized solution from GKN Hydrogen will ensure a sustainable and reliable emergency power
supply. The primary challenge for the client is to maintain communication for public institutions during weather-related power outages, thereby ensuring the uninterrupted safety of the population.

In such situations, the hydrogen-powered energy storage system from GKN Hydrogen will be used. The system is designed for a continuous electrical output of 10 kW and provides emergency power for up to four days or 96 hours. This is sufficient to operate
the communication tower without interruption until normal power supply is restored. The hydrogen, produced using grid electricity and electrolysis, is stored almost loss-free as a solid in metal powder for years. When needed, an integrated fuel cell converts the stored hydrogen back into electricity, which then operates the communication facility.